"My Name Is Red"

[fiefoe]

<Lovers, illustrated>

• For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
• I thought how my visit to her at the window on horseback closely resembled that moment, pictured a thousand times, in which Husrev visits Shirin beneath her window-only in our case, there was that melancholy tree between us. When I recognized this similarity, oh how I burned with a love such as they describe in those books we so cherish and adore.
• Only in cheap, hastily illustrated books by careless artists are the eyes of some women trained not on the ground or on some thing in the illustration... but directly at the reader. I've long wondered about that reader.
• When I feel this delight, like like those beautiful women with one eye on the life within the book and one eye on the life outside, 1, too, long to speak with you who are observing me from who knows which distant time and place.
• Thus was I better able to understand Ibn Arabi's notion that love is the ability to make the invisible visible  and the desire always to feel the invisible in one's midst.
  
• "How beautifully we embraced each other just now," she said. "And already everything has lost its primal mystery"
  

_ A man who knows how to embrace is a good man.
_ True respect arises not from the heart, but from discrete rules and deference.

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